Letter from the Editor

It’s getting to feel a lot like summer.
Days are long as the sun sidles north. At 14 hours and about 52 minutes of daylight, we’re rushing toward the longest days of this year, June 20 and 21, when the sun is with us 14 hours 56 minutes 18 seconds. With all that sun time, skies are blue and clouds shape-changing puffballs — except when thunderstorms clatter through and drench our plans. The vegetable kingdom is in riot, encompassing earth in green. Food is growing in our gardens and swelling in our orchards.

Has the world ever looked more beautiful? Probably, in some pristine past, but in the eye of this beholder, these late days of spring sparkle with perfection — and when the sun doesn’t come out they give us moody skies reflected in shady green.
Who doesn’t want to be out in times like this?

Memorial Day is both a holiday and a holy day.
On the far side of war, it’s the holiday beginning summer’s season of outdoor living, welcomed with barbecues, crab feasts and pool openings. I’m eager to plunge into that season this week or next, weather permitting. Imagining you are too, all of us here are preparing Bay Weekly’s indispensible Summer Guide to tuck inside your June 8 paper.

A couple of recent stories have given us just the response we like to hear: You loved them.
Every Wednesday afternoon, we wash our hands of the next day’s paper, just as I’m doing today on the paper of May 18, 2017 — which happens to be one of which we’re all proud.
When our work is done, yours begins. For newspapering is a partnership among those who make it — writers, editors, photographers, designers, ad reps, advertisers — and those who read it. We and You.

Or, if it’s too late, about her (in which case you can skip the flowers and candy, or enjoy them yourself)

Sandra Olivetti Martin

In due to Anna Jarvis, who lobbied for a day to thank our mothers and give women a share of the limelight trained on men, I can think of a couple of good things to say about Mother’s Day.
First, it’s broad enough to include us all, for while all of us are not mothers, we all do have mothers.

With Kid Summer beginning June 8, now’s getting to be the time to figure out what the kids will do without the routine of school. Just in time comes our Last-Minute Camp Guide, laying out lots and lots of ways your kids can have more fun this summer than is likely on your agenda. I read about these camps with such desire that I’d almost be a kid again to get to go to camp. Except that for kids, most everybody is the boss of you, while we grown-ups are free — or so it appears to them.

The Chesapeake runs through us. If we knew rivers better, how they twist and turn and emerge from many places, I could call the inundated bed of the Susquehanna what it is, our river of life. Easier to understand are trees, which stand in one place and let you see them in their enormity, from their great trunks to their spreading limbs branching irrepressibly into twigs and leaves. (Their roots, for the most part, you have to imagine.)

When you take time to count, thoughts start tickling your brain.
That sequence — 22-23-24 — which I hadn’t noticed until I wrote it down, could start its own numerological train of thought.
Here’s another number: 1,219. That’s how many editions of Bay Weekly we will have made in the 24 years since we published Vol. 1 No. 1 on Earth Day 23, April 22, 1993.
What do all those issue amount to? Where did all those years go? How is now different from then?

In 90 days of deliberations since Jan. 11, the 2017 Maryland General Assembly told us a lot about the state we’re in. It’s a message bigger than the sum — and subtraction — of the parts of the hundreds of laws passed or the 2,000-plus bills bypassed this year.

Mary Davis makes quite the Bay Weekly cover girl.
In one way, you may find her appearance surprising. Yet she’s just Bay Weekly’s kind of story.
We’re inspired by people who have figured out what matters to them. Swan calling or oyster gardening, community organizing or organic farming, bee keeping or ballroom dancing, body building or poetry proselytizing, opening a new restaurant or keeping up a family gallery, somebody is sure to do it.